FFXIV’s Combat Has Become Too Obsessed With GCD Uptime

[Arrius]

These debuffs were removed because... Not sure why, really. PLD's was kinda not-good (10% STR/Physical Damage reduction, most damage bosses did was Magical TBs and Magical Raidwides), but I don't think it was that. More likely they just couldn't be bothered with considering 'oh we need to increase the boss's damage output by 15%, because the Tanks will reduce it back down with their debuffs' on every piece of content. Could be a good way to differentiate the MTs and OTs in 8.0, though, bringing such a system back, and it'd explain why EG WAR is going to be considered an OT (IE it goes back to being able to reduce the enemy's damage by 10%, with 100% uptime)

They became mandatory during Alexander Savage raids onwards, so specific jobs were filtered out in favor for the debuffs. Just like the resistance debuffs some had as well (you wouldn't need a Samurai for the slash debuff, since a Warrior could do the same. And Monk was the only one who could debuff their own damage type which no other job was able to benefit from).

[RaionKansen]

I think one of the biggest issues with FFXIV’s current combat design is that the game has become too centered around one idea: keep your GCD rolling at all times.

Of course, maintaining GCD uptime matters. I am not saying players should randomly stop pressing buttons. The problem is that the entire design philosophy seems to revolve around making sure almost nothing interferes with the GCD.

Kind of a weird thing to say when we just had a Savage tier that constantly makes players fight for their GCDs. The encounter design is constantly trying to interfere with your GCD.
oGCDs themselves actively interfere with your GCD and you have to space out when and where you choose to use them. Especially on Tanks and Healers.

BUT AS ALWAYS, leave it to someone that hasn't engaged with any of the actual higher end content to say something completely ignorant.

[Ankhira]

Kind of a weird thing to say when we just had a Savage tier that constantly makes players fight for their GCDs. The encounter design is constantly trying to interfere with your GCD.
oGCDs themselves actively interfere with your GCD and you have to space out when and where you choose to use them. Especially on Tanks and Healers.

If people have to fight for their GCDs and structure everything around not dropping them, then that is the design philosophy OP is talking about. Mechanics trying to disrupt uptime doesn’t contradict the idea that job design revolves around maintaining it, it actually proves it.

You’re talking about encounter design in terms of mechanics that challenge uptime. Those two things can coexist, and in this case, they both have the same effect. Do mechanics while keeping your GCD rolling. Which, in turn, means, the entire "difficulty" in job design, is, as OP said, "Keep your GCD rolling at all times."

[BabyYoda]

Kind of a weird thing to say when we just had a Savage tier that constantly makes players fight for their GCDs. The encounter design is constantly trying to interfere with your GCD.
oGCDs themselves actively interfere with your GCD and you have to space out when and where you choose to use them. Especially on Tanks and Healers.

BUT AS ALWAYS, leave it to someone that hasn't engaged with any of the actual higher end content to say something completely ignorant.

I agree that high-end encounters do test your ability to maintain GCD uptime. Savage and Ultimate mechanics often force players to move, weave, mitigate, heal, and still keep their rotation going.

But I do not think that contradicts the original point. If anything, it supports it.

The issue is not that encounters never interfere with GCD uptime. The issue is that the entire combat structure still asks the same question most of the time: can you solve the mechanic while keeping your damage GCD rolling?

That design direction creates a very narrow space for job design.

For example, healers are heavily pushed toward oGCD healing because a GCD heal competes directly with a damage GCD. Tanks are also pushed toward oGCD mitigation because defensive decisions are expected to happen without interrupting the damage loop.

That may be efficient, but it also makes many jobs feel structurally similar. Different animations, different gauges, different names, but the same basic rule underneath: keep the GCD rolling and fit everything else around it.

This is why I think real job diversity becomes very difficult under this model. If every important non-damage action has to avoid disrupting the damage GCD, then healing, mitigation, and utility all get compressed into similar oGCD systems.

So the problem is not simply “uptime exists.” Uptime should matter. The problem is when uptime becomes such a dominant rule that it limits how differently jobs can actually play.

[RaionKansen]

snipped for character limit

OP specifically says "The problem is that the entire design philosophy seems to revolve around making sure almost nothing interferes with the GCD."
It is not the same.

Lets go though their additional points together:

1) "reduces decision making...": Any kind of optimization is going to reduce your decision making. There's always going to be a best order to do things in. That's just gaming in general.
1a) "it can an also make mitigation, healing, and utility feel like external cooldown management rather than a deep part of the combat system.": This is word salad. Cooldown management is a deep part of the combat system. Just because there's an optimal way to do your actions in sequence doesn't mean that it becomes "external"

2) "Second, it makes jobs feel more similar.": Jobs do feel similar, but there's no real way to change this unless they make jobs with incredibly fast or slow GCDs. They tried to make Tendo Setsukegga a long cast at the start of Dawntrail and people freaked out. If there was any time to experiment though, it will be with the Reborn/Evolved mode split. You cannot escape the GCD system in a tab target MMORPG. It's the most fundamental element of the genre.

3) "Third, it creates a strange problem for healers...": This is and isn't true. You want to refine unnecessary GCD healing over time, but if you dont GCD heal at all on prog in high end content you're legitimately trolling. Most players that do Savage/Ultimate will actively avoid grouping with greedy "parsebro" healers who just refuse to GCD heal. Especially on the first couple weeks of a fresh Savage tier when raidwides will wipe the party if healers don't play a bit safe. There's a good chance they reduce the number of oGCDs healers have in Evercold, but we'll have to see more evolved jobs.

3a) "Tanks also suffer from this design...." No... They don't. If you need to mit under a burst window you pop your mits in advance. Sometimes you pop things early anyways so that you can have your mits ready for a future mechanic. All of this also doesn't propose any kind of alternative. You would either have to apply mits to their already existing GCDs or give them new GCD cooldowns which actively interrupt your rotation just to use mitigation unless they also give those abilities high potencies, which would then result in players wanting to use them regardless of whether or not a tank buster is going to happen just for DPS min-maxing. (The tank would be trolling by being this greedy, but I don't know why we'd choose to actively add another layer of greed to the game)

"Keep your GCD rolling" is the system we've signed up for in a tab target MMORPG. There's literally no other game in the genre that detracts from this because there's no real way to. Even if you speed up or slow down GCDs, the same rules still apply.

[Azurarok]

Always Be Casting in of itself is fine imo, I find more issue in them removing most thinking involved for juggling dps with basically anything else, like lossless healing or damageless gapclosers, 1.5s glare/broil and oGCD healing, removing shared gauge resources, enmity combos, the 2min meta, dot removal, rng removal, etc.

[Starrya]

I think it's worth pointing out that, "I want there to be more GCDs that do things other than damage and are important to press." is not the same as, "I want it to not matter as much if my GCD stops rolling." Even if there were a bunch of GCDs that did stuff that wasn't damage, and you needed to press them, keeping those GCDs rolling would still be the optimal play. Creating puzzles around how to maintain uptime while doing whatever turbo-macarena the fight is asking of you IS the game design. The only way to make it so rolling the GCD wouldn't be optimal would be to basically remove filler.

[BabyYoda]

...

I think the disagreement here is mostly about definitions.

Nobody is saying GCD uptime should not matter, or that players should be rewarded for randomly stopping their rotation. GCD uptime is obviously a core part of FFXIV’s combat.

The issue is when almost every other part of combat has to be designed around not disturbing that damage GCD.

For example, yes, cooldown management exists. But the problem is that a lot of cooldowns do not feel deeply connected to job identity anymore. You can often see the same kind of skill repeated from one job to another with a different name, animation, or visual effect, but not a meaningfully different gameplay identity.

That is why I do not think “cooldown management exists” fully answers the criticism. The question is not whether cooldowns exist. The question is whether those cooldowns create a distinct combat identity for each job.

The same applies to job similarity. I do not think the only possible difference is “fast GCD vs slow GCD.” There are other trade-offs the game could explore, such as:

1. More damage now vs stronger utility later.
2. Personal DPS gain vs party safety.
3. Simpler uptime rotation vs higher-risk resource management.

Those kinds of trade-offs can create job identity without removing the GCD system.

For healers, yes, GCD healing is used during progression. Nobody serious is saying healers should refuse to GCD heal when the party needs it. But long term, the game itself teaches players to remove GCD healing as much as possible because the developers already gave healers stronger and more efficient oGCD tools.

So when people say “healers should GCD heal more,” the issue is that the game design itself often makes that feel unnecessary or inefficient. That is not only player greed. That is design by choice.

Tanks also do suffer from this design, just in a different way. Mitigation exists, but mitigation is often separated from the tank’s core rotation, core gameplay, and job fantasy. The defensive buttons are important, but they often do not express a unique identity strongly enough.

This is also why tank homogenization feels so obvious. A lot of tank mitigation tools are functionally very similar. They may have different names, animations, or minor differences, but they often do not create a truly different gameplay flavor between tanks.

And about greed: I actually think greed can be healthy when it creates real risk. If a player gets too greedy and causes a wipe, kills other players, or loses the run, then that is a meaningful trade-off. At that point, the answer is simple: get good.

The problem is not that greed exists. The problem is when the entire system is built so heavily around maintaining damage uptime that utility, healing, mitigation, and job identity are pushed outside the core gameplay loop.

I also agree that any major change will get criticism. That is normal. Players need time to adapt, and not every experiment will land perfectly. But criticism of change does not automatically mean the change is bad. Sometimes the game needs some discomfort before the system becomes healthier.

So I do not think the argument is “remove GCD uptime.” The argument is that uptime has become so dominant that healing, mitigation, utility, and even job identity are often forced to orbit around it instead of being deeply integrated into the combat system.

[BabyYoda]

I think it's worth pointing out that, "I want there to be more GCDs that do things other than damage and are important to press." is not the same as, "I want it to not matter as much if my GCD stops rolling." Even if there were a bunch of GCDs that did stuff that wasn't damage, and you needed to press them, keeping those GCDs rolling would still be the optimal play. Creating puzzles around how to maintain uptime while doing whatever turbo-macarena the fight is asking of you IS the game design. The only way to make it so rolling the GCD wouldn't be optimal would be to basically remove filler.

I actually agree with this distinction.

Wanting more important non-damage GCDs is not the same as wanting GCD uptime to stop mattering. I do not think the goal should be to reward players for randomly letting their GCD sit idle.

Keeping the GCD rolling should still be optimal.

My issue is more about what the GCD is allowed to represent.

Right now, the combat system often treats the damage GCD as the “real” core gameplay, while healing, mitigation, and utility are pushed into oGCD cooldown management so they do not interfere with that loop.

So yes, even if we had more non-damage GCDs, players would still want to keep the GCD rolling. But the decision inside that rolling GCD could become more interesting.

For example, the question would not be:

“Do I stop pressing buttons or keep uptime?”

It would be:

“Which GCD is the correct one here, and what am I giving up by choosing it?”

That is the kind of trade-off I think the game lacks in many places.

For healers, this is very obvious. The game gives them many strong oGCD healing tools, so over time GCD healing becomes something you try to remove as much as possible. That is not just player greed. That is design by choice.

For tanks, mitigation exists, but it often feels separated from the tank’s core rotation and job identity. Many mitigation tools are functionally similar across tanks, just with different names, animations, or small differences. They are important buttons, but they do not always make each tank feel meaningfully different.

So I agree that “keep your GCD rolling” is part of the game. I am not arguing against that.

I am arguing that the things we roll through the GCD could carry more identity, more cost, and more decision-making than just maintaining a damage loop while everything else sits outside it.

[Myllah_Lyte]

I imagine this is a big motivation for Evolved mode's changes and the two-minute meta.
Always Be Casting isn't going away but the importance of lining up burst windows took it from optimization and an opportunity for skill expression to "you're griefing your party if you ever fall behind on your rotation"